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36 Legis. Stud. Q. 1 (2011)

handle is hein.journals/lgvessqy36 and id is 1 raw text is: Introduction Legislatures are almost always complicated organizations oper- ating in complex governing structures. Consequently, it is not surpris- ing that most of the studies in this issue of the Quarterly emphasize the conditional nature of many important relationships involving legisla- tures and legislators. The question of whether voters hold representatives responsible for their votes has long attracted scholarly attention because of the answer's implications for democratic theory. A new tack on this topic is offered by Brandice Canes-Wrone, William Minozzi, and Jessica Bonney Reveley. The authors examine U.S. House votes on crime policies and environmental policies between 1988 and 2004 to see if voters punish members who take unpopular positions on issues that are closely identified with or owned by a particular party. Using both OLS and a matching procedure, they find that issue salience largely drives punishment. When crime was an important issue in 1994, 1996, and 1998, voters penalized Democrats who voted on the soft side of crime legislation because they were seen as being out of step with popular demands on an issue where their party's position was suspect. In contrast, voters never considered environmental issues to be of paramount importance during this span of elections; consequently, Republicans who voted out of step with voter preferences on that set of issues were not punished, even though their party position was unpopular. As the authors note, this intriguing finding should be tested across a number of other issues, both those that have at some point been highly salient and others that only lurk in the background. An unusual aspect of the European Parliament is that its members must be responsive to two principals: their national party and their European party group. The question of when European parlia- ment members are more responsive or less responsive to the policy positions of each of the two principals is tackled by Ren6 Lindst dt, Jonathan B. Slapin, and Ryan J. Vander Wielen. Employing a decision- theoretic model of member behavior, the authors deduce that when European Parliament elections are proximate, European Parliament members shift their policy positions toward those of their national parties. In turn, European Parliament party groups exert greater influ- ence on European Parliament member preferences at the third-year midpoint of their term. These relationships are confirmed through a LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, XXXVI, 1, February 2011 1 DOI: 10.1111/j.1939-9162.2010.00001.x © 2011 The Comparative Legislative Research Center of The University of Iowa

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